After we posted yesterday’s story about how Mike Rinder and I had learned that we had each been victimized by the same private investigator, Eric Saldarriaga, I received an invitation form the US Attorney’s Office to speak at Saldarriaga’s sentencing today.

I decided to take it. The sentencing happens at 2 pm, and we are looking forward to it. But we’re also trying to prepare for this weekend’s book tour stop in Clearwater, Florida, so it’s going to be a busy day.

Eric Saldarriaga, private eye who took the fall for Scientology, 1973-2017

By Tony Ortega, November 15, 2018

Quote:

We have just learned that a little more than a year ago, a man named Eric Saldarriaga died after battling esophageal cancer. He died the day before his 44th birthday, leaving behind a wife and two young sons.

For some of you, that name may ring a bell. In 2015, Saldarriaga was sentenced to federal prison after he was caught using overseas hackers to steal the emails of about 60 victims on behalf of his clients.

One of his victims was former Scientology spokesman Mike Rinder. Another of them was your proprietor.

When we realized that we both had been targeted, Rinder and yours truly had no doubt who was paying Saldarriaga to try and hack us. (A couple of years earlier we had caught Saldarriaga spoofing us with bogus emails, but as far as we know he or his hackers never got access to our personal information.)

The US Attorney’s office in New York asked us if we wanted to say something in court at Saldarriaga’s sentencing. We took them up on the offer, and told the judge that we didn’t really care whether Saldarriaga got three months or six months for his crime, what we wanted was for the court to get to the bottom of who had hired Saldarriaga to target us.

The judge reacted somewhat aggressively, telling us that he didn’t have that power. But we learned later — and the New York Times reported — that in his chambers the judge said he knew full well that it was the Church of Scientology who had hired Saldarriaga to hack us. Saldarriaga had tried to help out — he did a controlled call with the FBI listening so they could catch his client, but the FBI and Justice Department were unable to bring charges against anyone but the private eye.

So Saldarriaga took the fall, and spent three months behind bars. A year later, in 2016, he got his cancer diagnosis. He died on October 23, 2017.

We only learned about it last week as we wondered what had become of the man who went to prison for working for Scientology. Then we saw that his wife and two sons have lost him.

We wish that weren’t the case.

This is twice now that Scientology has put non-Scientologist professionals on us who then died prematurely of cancer.